It has long been considered desirable to allow workers in a building to be located and to be paged. Personnel locator systems taught in White U.S. Pat. No. 4,275,385 and in Lester U.S. Pat No. 3,739,329 provide for the location of subscribers to be monitored, for calls to subscribers to be routed to the phone nearest a subscriber, for subscribers to be alerted by means located near the subscriber, and for the location of subscribers to be displayed.
In general, such arrangements allow for calls and pages to a subscriber to be routed to a communication or alerting means nearest the current location of the subscriber. The arrangments described above are limited in that the subscriber may not control whether the routing will occur. It is inconvenient for the subscriber to be called or paged no matter where the subscriber is. For example, it is inconvenient for the subscriber to be paged when the subscriber is in a bathroom or conference room. It is desirable that the subscriber be able to specify a method of completing calls and pages for each location. It is also desirable that the subscriber be able to easily change the specification.
Also, it has long been considered desirable to allow office workers as much control as possible in the processing of calls, thereby reducing the need for operators and enhancing the efficiency of telephone communication. In particular, it is desirable for called parties to be able to control the disposition of calls directed to them. A personal locator service taught in Jordan and Weber U.S. Pat. No. 4,313,035 provides subscriber control of a host of telephone services.
In general, such arrangements allow a subscriber to make an update transaction to a data base to store a call completion status that will then direct the completion of calls directed to the subscriber. Such arrangements are limited in that only completion status for telephone calls may be stored, and not completion status for visitors. Also, the arrangements described above are limited in that one call completion status is usually only useful while the subscriber is in one location. It is inconvenient to require the subscriber to update his completion status at the data base whenever the subscriber changes location.